Photo album is important as I have also read on the page indicated, Photo Albums (Late 2009) but this is not good information. Why does it take so long to do such a simple update? If we consider that such kind of plugins have been worked out many times by different programmers this is what all the beginners learn and do each time.

If you want to have a voice in the future development cycle of BuddyPress, you can vote here.

As Daniel points out, these tools are open source and free. The power of the open source paradigm stems from the fact that the greater community volunteers their time freely to extend and improve upon a given project.

You have two choices: either you wait for the developers (Andy from Automattic and outside volunteers) to implement new functionality, or you do it yourself. But, complaining about the pace of development and stating that it is simple to do and should be done already, is not the proper attitude.

When I say that something is simple I mean that this is the minimum that has to be done before introducing. Can you imagine today car without Air conditioning?

I can of course do this myself but after this I will never be able to make necessary changes. idea of following Great free tools and software is that you are only donating from time to time and everything is updated. When person do something it does not meter is it free or for paid it means he is mostly interested in development and name I’m not a developer and I’m only interested in final product.

Plug-in by Manoj Kumar is Great but this is not what will be supported by BP and if he decide to stop updating his plugin we all will stay on old version and will never grow up.

You get what you pay for I guess. Although, in the case of BuddyPress… at a cost of $0.00… you get a whole lot more than you pay for.

Besides, if they waited until the system had absolutely everything… it would never be released. It was only released about a month ago. And now that there is an official 1.0 version out, I predict that developers will be flocking to it and developing lots of great third party plugins. It’s already happening. Consider that a couple of motivated developers have already freely donated their time to create pretty decent (if basic at the moment) events and photo gallery plugins!!!!! Pretty awesome if you ask me.

As for document management… there are a number of standard WordPress plugins that will handle that for you. Of course, it won’t be integrated into the groups, activity feeds, etc… it would just be a WordPress page with downloads on it… but one of those plugins might serve as a stop-gap for you for now.

If you really want/need free social networking software that is more feature complete now… right now… try Elgg. But it doesn’t have nearly the same amount of developer interest, buzz and support… it’s no where near as user-friendly… and creating a theme that does anything more than change a few background colors and images is next to impossible. I did a lot of research into these two options and BuddyPress… even with the limits of it’s current 1.0 feature set… was the hands down winner. No contest.’

Finally, you say you don’t care if something if free or paid for… you only care about the final product. Well, if that’s the case, there are literally scores of commercial web applications out there right now that do similar things… socially networked Wiki’s, Intranets, etc… but most of them are very expensive. Look at SocialText, Telligent, Confluence, ClearSpace, MindTouch, Thought Farmer… and on and on. Tons of them. Some are more Wiki-like with some social stuff added and some are more Facebook like with some Wiki stuff added… but there is certainly no shortage of commercial options out there.

1. if you look at the main page on Andy’s homepage screen shot you will see in his many ALBUM quite interesting.

2. I think you are right partially but this is not a place were we can have such discussions. Just notice that not you, neither others will buy car that has no windows, and logic that if they do not issue version they will never be able to start this is not correct. The thing you wanted to say was “If they do not start they will never finish”.

3. I wish success to this project as I’m myself interested very much in this project like all others here. So let’s look what will be in the nearest future.

STAGE II now:

Who is a person here, who will be accepted by Andy Peatling also that can work on BP with the same quality and we can donate him enough money that will help him cover time. So we can all together move development of new feature closer to us. As If I donate to someone I do not want him to do something just for me but for all of us.

@ Andy Peatling

I wanted to ask one thing, currently as I know you have no feature of suggesting registered members. When you will be developing it, can you include following formula:

When I add people to my groups and say for example:

JANE

MIKE

LUCKA

…

Are members of Group SCHOOL can system automatically suggest them each other?

@Shalva.sultanishvili You’ve got two options if you’re in bind right now with whatever it is you’re working on. Like David say, you can check out Elgg if you’re in dire need of a fully functioning and supported Photo Album feature. You can also use Manoj Kumar’s album and pay him to provide you with further tech support.

Just because an official BP photo album plugin is on its way at the end of this year, it doesn’t mean that the bpPicture Album plugin will go straight to the ground. I don’t really anticipate much of a difference between those two and, really, how much more functionality do you truly need to display a picture?

As to the car analogy, it’s not so much selling a car without AC as it is selling a car that runs without gas (ie. on hydrogen like the Honda Clarity). Considering the other solid components are already out for BP, photo albums aren’t a necessity to social networking … just look at Twitter. Be patient and it’ll all soon come together very soon

Consider that WordPress is going to be at version 2.8 soon, and BuddyPress has just broken the champagne glass as 1.0 a few weeks ago, and already 1.0.1 is out.

All things come with time.

BuddyPress is an opensource project just like WordPress. This means that anyone can stomp in and contribute what they’d like, and Andy as the lead developer will get the final say-so as to what makes the cut and what does not. The previously mentioned bpPicture Album plugin is a great example of that. It does the job quite well in my opinion, and is also still not 100% finished.

I think it would be a pretty large undertaking to merge the WordPress blog attachment method with the BuddyPress member profile area. Considering that if you’re using WPMU and that person has a blog, would you want to have their uploads in their blog also appear in their profile, or would it be a dedicated area for uploads? There’s really a lot of different types of configurations this could take, any/all of which are viable and possible.

All that needs to happen is for a developer to see the need, and then fill it themselves.